Author Profile: Andrew Ainsworth
Author Archive for Andrew Ainsworth
If you didn’t happen to read the February issue of Ensign Magazine in 1987, you missed some valuable instruction about how to provide critical feedback to Church leaders. Luckily for you, this post provides a second chance to get up to speed on what all would-be “improvers” in the Church should know about how to seek improving the Church without crossing any line that will forfeit your eternal exaltation and doom you to an eternity of teeth-gnashing with a TK smoothie. Continue reading…
If someone can find something in the Book of Mormon, anything that they love or respond to or find dear, I applaud that and say more power to you. That’s what I find, too. And that should not in any way discount somebody’s liking a passage here or a passage there or the whole idea of the book, but not agreeing to its origin, its divinity. . . . [W]e have many people who are members of the church who do not have some burning conviction as to its origins, who have some other feeling about it that is not as committed to foundational statements and the premises of Mormonism. But we’re not going to invite somebody out of the church over that any more than we would anything else about degrees of belief or steps of hope or steps of conviction. . . . We would say: “This is the way I see it, and this is the faith I have; this is the foundation on which I’m going forward. If I can help you work toward that I’d be glad to, but I don’t love you less; I don’t distance you more; I don’t say you’re unacceptable to me as a person or even as a Latter-day Saint if you can’t make that step or move to the beat of that drum.” . . . We really don’t want to sound smug. We don’t want to seem uncompromising and insensitive. -Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, Mar. 6, 2006. (Source.)
I testify that one cannot come to full faith in this Latter-day work and thereby find the fullest measure of peace and comfort in these our times until he or she embraces the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the Lord Jesus Christ of whom it testifies. If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a heretofore unknown text, teeming with literary and Semitic complexity, without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages somehow–especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers–if that’s the case then such persons, elect or otherwise, have been deceived. And if they leave this Church, they must to do so by crawling over, or under, or around the Book of Mormon to make their exit.” -Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, Oct. 4, 2009. (Source.)
When Elder Holland delivered his stinging rebuke to Book of Mormon critics in his General Conference address last Sunday, reactions ranged from “woots” and “double woots” by literalist believers of the Book of Mormon, to disappointment by those who felt Elder Holland was backtracking on his prior statement that Church members who don’t believe the traditional story of its origins should not be considered “unacceptable . . . as a Latter-day Saint if [they] can’t make that step or move to the beat of that drum.” However, after listening carefully to Elder Holland’s address again, I think both camps might be mistaken about what Elder Holland was intending to say, particularly with regard to the “Inspired Fiction” theory of the Book of Mormon. Continue reading…
Several years ago I heard former Secretary of Defense William Cohen lament the sad state of affairs in American politics where, as he put it, “the Democrat and Republican parties seem to have stopped being loving critics of one another. Instead, we seem only to find uncritical lovers of their own party, and unloving critics of the opposing party.” I’m sure many of us sometimes wonder whether we are witnessing a similar polarizing trend in online discussions about the Church, and possibly even see ourselves as being part of the problem but are unsure of what to do about it. Continue reading…
“It’s the MOST WONderful TIIIME of the YEARRRRRR.” The leaves are starting to change color. The evenings and mornings are a bit crisper. Even the birds’ singing suddenly sounds sweeter than ever.
General Conference must be coming this weekend.
A year ago my wife and I were struggling to find ways to teach our children the importance of helping those in need, and lamented the fact that despite our knowing there are millions of families around the world who need help, we felt virtually powerless to make any significant difference in their lives. And although we were grateful for the opportunity to make monetary donations to the Church’s humanitarian program, we felt that writing a check quite wasn’t enough to help our children understand the challenges so many of the world’s families face; nor did it allow our children to witness the results of our family’s contributions. Continue reading…
Every now and then, you can find me sitting in testimony meeting with a note card on my lap and a pen in my hand, tallying the number of times that various phrases are repeated. I started doing this on my mission in a particular ward where Jesus’ name was notoriously absent from testimony meetings, with the exception of the standard closing line. Continue reading…
High Priests Groups world-wide are still reeling at the Church News’ announcement that questions surrounding the accuracy and authenticity of the Book of Abraham are not as important as critics suggest because the book “is not central to the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ” despite its inclusion in the canonized LDS Standard Works. (Read Church News article here.) Continue reading…
Any church is like an orange: it has sweet, juicy, nourishing fruit (i.e., truths that help people live better lives); and it has a tough, bitter peel that protects the fruit and holds it together (i.e. an organizational structure, prescribed forms of worship, and claims to divine authority). Were it not for its protective institutional peel, a church’s nourishing spiritual teachings would become damaged and lost; were it not for its fruitful truths, a church’s institutional peel would be hollow and purposeless. Continue reading…
David W. Bercot, a Texas attorney and Evangelical Christian, embarked on a quest to discover what Christians believed and practiced before the Nicene Creed. What he learned caused him to seriously re-evaluate his beliefs, to eventually change his religious affiliation, and to present his findings and analysis in his book Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. Although the book represents a critique of mainstream Evangelical Christianity in light of the teachings of the Early Church Fathers, Bercot’s analysis has surprising and thought-provoking application to Mormonism as well. While some may see Will the Real Heretics Stand Up as evidence that Joseph Smith successfully restored many Early Christian doctrines and practices, others may see the overlap between Early Christians and Mormons as the predictable result of Mormonism’s historical connection to the Campbellite Restorationist movement.
What do active Mormons think their Church leaders teach them, and what do they actually believe personally, about the infallibility of the Prophet’s statements about God’s will and truth, about God’s command to obey the Prophet, and about God blessing them for obeying the Prophet? These questions and related topics are explored in the poll below. Continue reading…
There have been several attempts over the years to categorize Mormon “belief-styles”: Orthodox Mormon versus Liberal Mormon, Iron Rod Mormon versus Liahona Mormon, and so on. In the online world of LDS blogs commonly called “the Bloggernacle”, Mormons are often categorized as being TBMs (True Believing Mormons) or NOMs (New Order Mormons).
One evening when my wife and I had the opportunity to reflect on the timeless story of Adam and Eve, it struck me that their different responses to God’s commandments, and to Lucifer’s “temptation”, perfectly exemplified the different mindsets of TBMs and NOMs, and symbolically portrayed the age-old struggle between Orthodox and Liberal in any faith. And as I meditated on their dramatic dialog with Lucifer, with each other, and with God, it donned on me that Adam and Eve were the perfect TBM-NOM couple.
The tragedy of 9/11 had a big impact on my views about the relationship between faith and reason. As I watched the video footage of the jumbo jets flying into the World Trade Center towers over and over again, it dawned on me that I was witnessing the destructive power of faith unchecked by reason. Consider for a moment the faith proposition that motivated the 9/11 hijackers: “If you slit a few throats to hijack a plane and then fly that plane into a skyscraper, killing yourself and all your comrades along with thousands of civilian men, women, and children, then God will reward you in Heaven with 72 virgins who will provide you more sensual delights than you could ever have hoped to enjoy during mortality.” Viewing the fruits of the hijackers’ faith — the twisted steel and endless ash, the homemade “Missing” flyers plastered everywhere, the sobbing relatives of the victims — I couldn’t help wishing the hijackers would have run that faith proposition through the wringer of reason before deciding to act upon it.
Faith needs reason because faith unchecked by reason can be just as deadly as reason unchecked by faith proved to be in the gulags of Soviet Russia, the Cultural Revolutions of Maoist China, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. (Would Stalin, Mao, and Pot have ordered the killings of millions if they had had faith in an afterlife and final judgment?)
We Mormons are certainly not immune to the potential dangers of unquestioning faith. Continue reading…
Recently, a veritable Icon of the Bloggernacle, who for purposes of anonymity we shall call “Aloysius Miller”, published a post stating: “I don’t see the church as an exclusive conduit to God,” and “I reject the claims that the church is a sole avenue to God.” Aloysius further stated: “I realize that those claims are a standard part of Mormon theology, and so my rejection of them makes me heterodox in that sense.”
Aloysius’ proclamation of self-declared hetrodoxy made me ask myself: Is he really at odds with Church doctrine in rejecting the notion that the LDS Church is “an exclusive conduit to God”? In other words, does the LDS Church even claim to be “an exclusive conduit to God”? Continue reading…
Ever since I read the MHA study ranking Utah as the #1 most depressed state in the U.S., I’ve been asking my Mormon friends and family why they think Utah has a higher percentage of population reporting depression than any other state.
Although Brigham Young is one of the most well-known Presidents of the LDS Church, perhaps second only to Joseph Smith, it seems most Mormons are completely unaware of his passionate beliefs about caring for the Environment.
We owe Hugh Nibley an enormous debt of gratitude for collecting Brigham’s teachings about the Environment and publishing them in his 1972 essay, “Brigham Young on the Environment”. When a home teacher shared the essay with me several years ago, I was shocked to read statement after statement by Brigham Young that one would expect to hear from a radical environmentalist, and I quickly discovered my need to repent and abandon my laisseiz-faire attitude toward the Environment.
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